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- Convenors:
-
Vanessa Melo
(School of Architecture, University of Lisbon)
Paul Jenkins (University of the Witwatersrand)
Anna Mazzolini (Nationalmuseet)
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- Stream:
- Sociology
- Location:
- Chrystal McMillan, Seminar Room 5
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 12 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel will discuss how land access in urban areas is being changed by a growing middle-class and its socio-spatial impacts, dealing with continuities in urban governance, but also disruptions in balances that have been achieved between elites and the lower income majority since Independence.
Long Abstract:
Since Independence, cities and towns have flourished in Sub-Saharan Africa, but usually through the expansion of peri-urban areas and with the majority of residents being lower income. However, the recent economic expansion of the region has promoted the growth of a middle-class, which is nevertheless still ill defined. Simultaneously, soon the majority of urban populations will have been born in urban areas, but most countries still do not have urban policies or coherent strategies within their often-limited resources for engaging with these dynamics.
This panel will discuss how urban areas are most recently being transformed by a growing middle-class - and include discussions on how the middle class can be defined, identified, measured and its urban impact ascertained. It thus deals with continuities in the nature of urbanity and urban land governance, but also disruptions of forms of balance which have been achieved between elites and the lower income majority since Independence, concerning governance of urban land in particular.
Recent research has shown that there seems to be clear evidence of such continuities and disruptions and that urban space is thus increasingly contested, with concepts such as the 'right to the city', as conceived by Lefebvre, far from being achieved - indeed potentially being hijacked by the middle class. As the conference theme suggests, the panel will examine what forces are driving these processes? Has a tipping point emerged in recent years? If so, what are the intended and unintended consequences of this pivotal temporal moment for African urban space?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 12 June, 2019, -Lindsay Sawyer (University of Sheffield)
Paper short abstract:
This paper compares the urban governance configurations of two very different processes of urbanisation in Lagos that are rapidly transforming the peripheries. The comparison focuses on the differing role of state actors and customary landowners, and the different relationship to land and tenure.
Paper long abstract:
In the past ten to fifteen years, so-called middle class and more elite housing has ballooned along the Lekki axis of Lagos, providing relatively wealthy residents with opportunities for affordable housing in private and state-owned estates. This process of urbanisation contrasts sharply with the longstanding de facto mode of urbanisation in Lagos that caters to the low-income majority and involves the rapid unplanned transformation of peripheries into densely populated areas through the piecemeal development of individual plots bought from customary landowning Families. These processes are not only producing very different material qualities and everyday experiences, but have very different relationships to land and tenure, reflecting different manipulations of the dual land regimes at work in Lagos: the customary and statutory. Based on recent fieldwork and a new three-year research project, this paper will begin to compare these processes, paying particular attention to their urban governance configurations and the differing roles of the state and customary landowners. How do these processes relate to one another, particularly as middle class and elite housing becomes more spatially dominant and is the focus of infrastructural development? The paper reads across postcolonial notions of informality, political theories of the state, and developmental concepts of political settlements to question how customary authority fits into our understandings of urban governance and land, and how this might inform more grounded and contextualised approaches to African urbanism.
Miriam Badoux (University of Basel)
Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic research conducted in Eldoret, Kenya, this paper looks at the ways in which the 'scramble for land' impacts urban dwellers, and vice versa. More specifically, I ask which role urban land plays in social stratification processes in a fast-growing secondary city like Eldoret.
Paper long abstract:
The land question in Kenya has long played a central role in public discourse, being often described as one of the main 'problems' of the nation. While most of the research on this topic has focused on rural areas, struggles for land ownership increasingly take place in urban centres, where the pressure on land is particularly high and its market value rising rapidly. In Eldoret, a fast-growing secondary city located in Kenya's Rift Valley, it is common to hear that "land is gold", or even "better than gold". Yet, it is not only its economic value that makes land such a contested resource; rather, land is embedded in issues of urban citizenship, local authority, as well as social and political tensions. Based on ethnographic research on land claims and urban governance conducted in Eldoret between 2014 and 2016, this paper looks at the ways in which the 'scramble for land' impacts urban dwellers, and vice versa. By analyzing the views, claims, and practices of a wide array of actors such as private developers, lawyers, planners, state authorities, but also ordinary people, I question the role played by land in social stratification processes in a secondary city like Eldoret. I argue that taking land as a starting point may open up new ways to empirically approach, and eventually conceptualise, urban middle classes.
Jacky Bouju ( Aix Marseille Université)
Paper short abstract:
Cette contributionexamine l'ampleur du phénomène d'accumulation foncière effrénée au Mali. En analysant les stratégies de patrimonialisation des parcelles anciennes ou moins anciennes, les données montrent qu'elle touche aussi bien des citadins riches que des personnes aux revenus très modestes.
Paper long abstract:
Cette contribution s'appuie sur une enquête conduite en milieu urbain et péri-urbain au Mali autour de l'appropriation du foncier. L'enquête a montré que la propriété foncière permettait d'affirmer le rôle de chef de famille voire de le revendiquer. Posséder une (ou mieux des) parcelle d'habitation, affirme ou améliore la situation statutaire de tout acteur social et lui confère du prestige et de l'honneur. La propriété foncière conforte la position sociale d'une personne respectable et stabilise durablement son statut social. Cependant, au-delà du prestige d'être « propriétaire foncier », l'enquête a aussi montré que le foncier était le principal domaine d'accumulation capitaliste légalement profitable.
L'ampleur du phénomène logique d'accumulation foncière effrénée qui touchait aussi des personnes aux revenus très modestes ne pouvait pas être expliqué par la seule logique de construction statutaire. C'est en analysant les stratégies de patrimonialisation des parcelles anciennes ou moins anciennes, acquises sur le marché ou par dotation administrative que nous avons été mis sur la bonne piste interprétative. Et ce sont quelques-unes de ces stratégies que je vais décrire dans ce papier. Leur intérêt dans le cadre de cat ouvrage est de montrer l'enchevêtrement inextricable de logiques sociales apparemment inconciliables. En effet, si les symboles et les habitudes culturelles constituent un cadre de référence comportemental largement partagé, si les normes de transfert des droits fonciers ont une histoire politique bien connue localement, les acteurs des transactions foncières exercent pleinement leur capacité à modifier de manière calculée ou opportuniste les règles du jeu social.
Morten Nielsen (National Museum of Denmark)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the socio-spatial repercussions of speculative land investments in Maputo, Mozambique, made to accommodate a national middle class, which might no longer exist. While the expected profit might never be gained, investments serve to reconfigure existing socio-spatial hierarchies.
Paper long abstract:
Based on ongoing ethnographic research in Maputo, Mozambique, this paper examines the socio-spatial repercussions of speculative land investments made to accommodate a national middle class, which might no longer exist. If it ever did. Less than 10 years ago, sub-Saharan Africa's growing urban middle class was mobilized as the continent's savior. With increasing levels of consumption and explicit demands for democratic stability, the African urban middle class was considered as the harbinger of a bright future untainted by the economic and political weaknesses of the past. Today, the prospective role for the urban middle class seems less clear. The expected macro-economic growth has not yet materialized and it is doubtful whether an expanding middle class does, in fact, lead to better governance and reduced poverty. Still, as I will argue in this paper, while sub-Saharan African urban middle classes might have failed to bring about radical improvements of overall socio-political and economic conditions, imageries and expectations associated with middle-classness continue to reverberate through the continent's urban landscapes with considerable consequences for numerous and differently positioned urbanites. In a small neighborhood on the outskirts of Maputo, recent speculative investments in land have activated and fundamentally reconfigured local socio-spatial hierarchies. Crucially, many investors, residents and community authorities doubt that the planned middle class construction projects will ever be successfully realized. Instead, the construction projects serve as apt vehicles for modulating existing socio-cosmological relations to land and also for allowing a range of different actors to articulate new forms of land claims.